I built an AI Tools Search Engine solo — 2500+ tools, zero VC, zero team
Hey IH community!
I'm Murali — 20+ years in Linux and Infrastructure, Indian Air Force veteran.
One evening a flash idea hit me: "What if there was a Yellow Pages for AI tools?" I bought the domain that night.
What I built:
AIllowpages is a free AI tools search engine. 2500+ curated AI tools across 32 categories. Zero ads, zero bias, free forever.
What makes it different:
- Proprietary relevance engine — smarter ranking, not plain keyword matching
- Groq AI powered search — not just keywords, actual intelligence
- 32 category landing pages
- While every other AI directory is going paywalled — this stays free. Always.
Stack: FastAPI, Meilisearch, Redis, Docker, AlmaLinux — fully self-hosted. AI co-pilots: Claude, DeepSeek, ChatGPT.
Where I am now: Just launched. Google indexing picking up — 2035 pages discovered. First organic click received. Looking for feedback from the IH community!
Would love feedback on the search experience and what categories you'd want to see more tools in!
The "always free" position is the part I'd want to pressure-test.
Directories live or die on freshness, and freshness eventually costs real money — moderation, curation hours, server costs as the index grows. Most AI directories that started free either added a paywall around month 18 or quietly went stale.
What's the long-term plan? Sponsored tool slots eventually? Premium analytics for tool makers? Something else? Genuinely curious because I'd rather know now than watch another good directory drift.
The self-hosted FastAPI + Meilisearch + Redis stack is the right call for cost control at this scale though. That's the part most YC-style AI directories get wrong — they burn cash on managed services that don't pay back at 2500 tools.
Congrats on the launch. The Air Force + Linux background combo is going to give you operational discipline most directory founders don't have.
Really like the “Yellow Pages for AI” framing here — immediately understandable.
Also appreciate the operational transparency around the stack and search architecture. A lot of AI tooling launches stay too abstract, but concrete infrastructure details build trust quickly.
Congrats on the launch.
This is brilliant Murali — the "Yellow Pages for AI" framing is spot on. I built something similar called AI Tools Hub (164 curated free tools) so I know exactly how much curation work goes into keeping these directories clean and unbiased. The Groq-powered search is a smart differentiator — most directories are just static lists. Curious how you're handling tool submissions and keeping the database fresh as new tools launch daily? That was my biggest challenge. Rooting for this one.
This comment was deleted 4 months ago